GOLDFINGER
1964
Directed by Guy Hamilton
Written by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)
It's honestly a bit staggering, even knowing it's coming—even having taken pains to identify the iterative developments of the franchise over the course of its two predecessors, Dr. No and From Russia With Love, and acknowledging how close they already were to "getting it right"—but now we arrive upon Goldfinger, the third James Bond film, the second to receive a U.S. release in 1964, and it isn't close, it's just there, and the difference between a bunch of parts almost working together and a bunch of parts given a right proper polish and now singing together in glorious harmony can still take you by surprise. Its achievement was recognized immediately—even the contemporary reviews were good, however smirking—but the public certainly recognized it. It set opening week records, second week records, third week records; demand was such the DeMille theater in New York changed its hours of operation to show the film around the clock for the last week of 1964, meaning it ruined Christmas for hundreds of people. Blazing past Russia With Love's box office take ($125 million against $79 million), Goldfinger represented something near Bond's market saturation point; in inflation-adjusted dollars (almost $1.3 billion today) the only Bond film surpassing Goldfinger would be its immediate follow-up, Thunderball, until Skyfall five decades later. (And it's still its third-highest grosser.) It's probably the most widely-seen "classic" Bond today, too—the definitive "if you only see one" one. It's not a perfect movie, nor would I even declare it "a perfect James Bond movie," for I have doubts such a thing could exist. But it is a perfection of its franchise's form; you'll forgive me for failing to resist the temptation to which I'm sure a thousand other writers have succumbed in their turn, but it is the series' gold standard.
It's where just about everything came together into The Bond Formula, and being the first great execution of that formula, its freshness has been preserved: it bears the first pre-credits sequence that's effectively its own action-thriller short film; the first credits sequence with an original song based on the film we're watching, in this case quite accurately, "Goldfinger" sung by Shirley Bassey, the most iconic of all Bond film chanteuses; and from there, the first credits sequence that works for the movie, rather than as a fun thing to look at while they list names. Later, we get the first true Q Branch sequence where Bond wanders around a cinematically-convenient open plan lab where Q is overseeing several different experiments simultaneously, and thus we get Desmond Llewelyn's first real Q performance as well, revealing that Bond annoys him with his fecklessness, while Bond broadcasts how bored he is with Q's lectures; it'll also be the first movie where Bond talks this much about alcoholic spirits with an air of snobbish condescension, going so far as to humiliate his boss M (Bernard Lee) who gave him the opening in the first place by asking him a brandy-related question (it is, furthermore, the first "shaken not stirred" in the series). For the first time, Bond openly telegraphs whom he's here for: the inner children of middle-aged men who, in their 1964 editions, despised the commies and the Beatles; for if James Bond hates them too, it means you're the cool one, dad. We shall meet the first Bond Girl brought to life by some measure of effective performance, actually getting three in a row, including the first and the second to get killed thanks to Bond's interference. Soon, Bond will face his first groovy deathtrap. In its titular figure, Goldfinger shall confront us with Bond's first successfully larger-than-life megalomaniac; with him comes the first henchman who poses an overwhelming physical threat to Bond, but also does so as a vehicle for a goofball gimmick. And, of course, in conjunction with its vivid monsters, Goldfinger gives us Bond's first breathlessly-excited depiction of a world-beating evil plot, insofar as even if Dr. No's plot was suitably evil, you'll agree that his movie didn't care anywhere nearly this much about it, while Goldfinger spends half its runtime beaming with irrepressible pride at the mere thought of its plot, even before it's revealed it to us; hell, the events of the movie only cohere if you agree that its villain desperately wants an intelligent outsider to show his sinister machinations off to. And with "Operation Grand Slam"—the only thing I don't like about it is its name! am I not getting something? why is it baseball?—it is also the series' first genuinely great idea for a James Bond plot; it might not have had another one till 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me, then never again.
I have endeavored to be thorough here, about the formula and how Goldfinger completes it—frustratingly, it's lacking the one tiny thing, in that it's still the same Bob Simmons-starring "gun barrel" opening, so it's frustrating they hadn't fixed that yet—but, yes, I recite all the foregoing more as ritual, because I realize it's all stuff we all already know. However, let me add that it's the first Bond movie that's undeniably better than the book it's based on. I would accept quibbles that one might miss some things from the book, like maybe there's some happier medium between the protracted apocalyptic struggle across eighteen holes, such as Ian Fleming wrote for Bond and Goldfinger's first face-to-face meeting, and the film's own truncated sequence of golf hi-jinx. (I've managed to be pleasantly surprised by the interiority afforded Bond in Fleming's novelistic medium, but outside of the world-weariness of its opening passages, the main way his seventh Bond novel takes advantage is in its exploration of Bond's inability to openly express his fury at a golf cheat.) I suppose the book's okay, but it third acts miserably, and the film third acts majestically, despite retaining the basic shape of the book including the basic shape of its problems. Perhaps every single change winds up an improvement, from something as inarguable as "it makes more sense," to as relieving as "it's not crazy racist," to as minor as "the movie's heard of color symbolism," to as crucially important as "that great idea? that incredible reveal? isn't even in the book."
And if we're ever going to get to that great idea, we should start discussing the film itself, which has much more besides that, despite being, at 110 minutes long, the shortest James Bond movie for a half-century—hey, maybe there's something to that!—which startled me, certainly not because it "feels longer" in any negative way, but because it's so full-bodied and by-God-epic that it doesn't seem possible that it could be under two hours. As noted, Goldfinger serves up an aperitif in the form of its pre-credits sequence, recognizable as the mission Bond (Sean Connery) had just wrapped up in the novel, though the heroin factory he destroys is much more mod and stylishly-designed than I suppose Fleming imagined (because production designer Ken Adam is back), as is the action itself, because after Bond has infiltrated the compound by way of an amphibious assault, we get the first of maybe a good dozen images from this movie that have lodged themselves inextricably into the pop cultural consciousness, namely Bond stripping off his wetsuit to reveal the pressed white dinner jacket underneath, so that we know within a minute or so what Goldfinger's up to, which is riding right up to the line where the fantastically cool meets the ridiculously silly. But is it ridiculously silly? It's not like Bond's already wearing his lapel flower under his wetsuit. That would be silly. Well, it doesn't totally work out—though he returns to his cover identity as some kind of, I guess, fancily-dressed sex tourist, perhaps someone noticed that this cool guy didn't even react to that explosion. Whatever the case, his paramour (Nadja Regin) has set him up, which he sees literally in her eyes in the best composite shot of a film where one of its few real problems of manufacture is bad 60s compositing, and he nastily uses her skull as a shield before grappling with his assailant. Altogether, it's a badder-ass scene than it gets credit for—the fight choreography is almost as good as Russia With Love's train fight in its confined brutality, and the notion that this is the tossed-off action here is tantalizing—and editor Peter Hunt is wonderfully communicating Bond's desperate quick-thinking when he electrocutes his attacker in a bathtub a split-second before the latter can steal his gun. Things conclude with Connery puking out not-the-first-but-might-as-well-be forcefully bad Bond pun, as if Bond despises his enemies all the more that they brought such abysmal wordplay to mind: "Shocking... Positively shocking." Sixty seconds earlier, though, we got perhaps the first legitimately hilarious Bond quip, when his paramour asks why he's always carrying that gun around: "I have a slight inferiority complex"—which Connery seems to enjoy saying, because he understands what a weirdly multilayered, meta joke it is.
That throws us into "Gold-FING-ah" ("the man with the Midas touch, a spider's touch"; the lyrics are a little goofy, but by no means inapropos—and it's true, you know, he does love only gold). It's an easy pick for "best Bond song," and would be high on my list, too. Robert Brownjohn returned from Russia With Love to do the accompanying visuals, and it's not dissimilar to his earlier credits sequence, but the objectified woman with lights projected upon her is truly only an object now: covered in gold paint in reference to a particularly memorable demise the movie's going to spring on us shortly, the inescapable implication is this is a corpse, rendered by those projections into a battleground for Bond and his enemies, and as Bassey beautifully shrieks of Goldfinger's grotesque cruelty atop the metallic bombast of John Barry's music, it's inevitably more unsettling than sexy, albeit in a way that's still colorfully melodramatic fun (though if you prefer the ones that don't pornify corpses, I wouldn't argue with you). Now, on the other side of some aerial photography of a ritzy Miami hotel, one of the most technically-gorgeous travelogue shots (concluding with one of the best cuts) that any Bond film would ever manage, we find our man "vacationing," flirting with masseuse Dink (not even one of the Bond Girls, but Bond really fucks in Goldfinger; this is Margaret Nolan, who also played the credits sequence's body, which is odd and annoying because she's not the narrative's body). Bond's frolics are interrupted by M and Felix Leiter (Cec Linder), who sic him on one Auric Goldfinger (Gert Froebe, dubbed by Michael Collins), a precious metals magnate suspected of smuggling gold. (The then-prevailing pegged-to-a-dollar-pegged-to-gold monetary system apparently demanding a serious level of regulation of gold flows out of Britain; I half-wonder if Goldfinger exists because of some pissiness about Bretton Woods I don't understand.) Bond toys with Goldfinger and busts up his dubious and surprisingly obvious scheme to cheat at gin, waylaying Goldfinger's spotter Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) with his sexual charisma. Goldfinger is stymied, but Bond is confronted soon after with an accounting in gold: Jill's painted corpse in his bed, prompting the enduring urban legend about "skin suffocation" (hey, she could've still died of thermal dysregulation), while a mysterious karate chop-wielding, hat-wearing shadow that we will soon know as Oddjob (Harold Sakata) lays Bond low, Connery manfully completing the shot despite Sakata accidentally splaying his ass across the floor for real. (Sakata, not to be outdone, didn't cry for a cut when his final stunt, unbeknownst to the director, injured him.)
Bond denies it's a personal vendetta when he requests M keep him on Goldfinger—his golf duel pays few dividends—but its definitely a personal vendetta for Jill's sister Tilly Masterson (Tania Mallet), who is not good at vendettas (though Mallet is good enough you could wish she lasted longer), so that the only revenge she ultimately gets is returning the favor to the man who got her sister into deadly trouble, interfering with Bond and bringing Goldfinger's goons upon them and shortly prompting the Bond franchise's first great car chase (with Bond's first super-spy car, the iconic silver Aston Martin DB5 tricked out with gadgets e.g. an ejection seat designed for murder) through Goldfinger's metallurgical compound, which becomes a labyrinth in Hunt's editing and, at the end, makes the counter-intuitively awesome decision for Bond to fuck up like the Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon. Goldfinger torments Bond, then spares him for no particularly compelling reason, and off they go to Kentucky, the home of Goldfinger's stud farm—and Fort Knox, the United States Bullion Depository, not-so-coindentally surrounded by some 41,000 U.S. soldiers. Bond makes the acquaintance of pilot Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), a key associate of Goldfinger's as the leader of an all-girl (and all-blonde) flying circus; Bond is on hand to witness Goldfinger lay out one version of his scheme, which is, incredibly enough, to rob Fort Knox whilst Pussy drops a bunch of "knockout" gas on the base. Bond even mocks him—which is magnificent nerve, considering half the scene's purpose is to insult the still-living Fleming for writing such a surpassingly stupid book—but Goldfinger goads Bond to think about it a little harder, and having been led by the hand, Bond realizes Goldfinger has no interest in stealing the gold, but blowing it up with an atomic bomb, the only thing that could destroy the gold, rendering it seething with radioactivity, thereby increasing the value of his gold, while his Chinese allies profit from the wholesale collapse of the world economy.
My God, it's just so beautiful, at once so baroque yet so elegant—maybe just the best evil scheme there ever was, absurdly cartoonish on one hand, and (almost) chillingly plausible on the other, and, while it does involve large-scale death, the casualties are such an abstraction that it always feels like childish playtime, magnified by Froebe's malignantly jolly performance—and, as I intimated, it was not remotely what Fleming wrote, which was evidently immediately seized upon by everyone in real time as absurd. (Bond runs the numbers* whilst Goldfinger merely smiles.) So let's bow down to screenwriter Richard Maibaum** for this act of genius, and to both him and second-draft co-writer Paul Dehn for making general improvements all over to Fleming's stimulating but rough novel, particularly to the last third where Goldfinger pressgangs Bond into being his secretary; the movie's "I dunno, maybe you'll be useful as a hostage, or decoy" is not terribly credible either, and it is always obvious that Goldfinger hasn't killed Bond only because then the movie would stop, but it's still better, especially because they make it easy to assume that this Oppenheimer of Crime does have a need to be witnessed, considering he holds an entire symposium about his plot under the guise of an invitation to fellow crimelords, and then kills them all before they've even decided whether to throw in or not. Maibaum and Dehn also finesse Pussy a bit—despite bearing the best/worst Bond Girl name ("Pusshy!"), and despite Avengers alumna Blackman's strong, combative, stunt-ready performance, she's a sort of kludged-in factor here; but, in the novel, she's barely a factor at all—and if the miraculous resolution that her betrayal of Goldfinger provides is kludged, and for some reason takes the form of a comic, judo-inflected BDSM module instead of (not even in addition to) much of an onscreen conversation, at least there's a personality involved, rather than an excuse to write "Pussy" a hundred times and conjure madperson theories about how suffragettes made everybody gay.*** Events likewise continue to occur to give Bond something/anything to do, rather than sit there like an asshole for nearly a hundred pages, or, sorry, drop a note he hopes the cleaners pick up. (There's an entire scene dedicated to that not working in movie.) The screenplay also pulls back on the moronically large scale of Leiter's counter-Goldfinger possum subterfuge while, in the form of that nuke, providing a reason to resort to it in the first place—really, there's no end to how they fixed Fleming's book, while only ever intensifying the imagination-capturing spectacle at its center.
The villain is equal to his plot: Froebe is greed personified, self-regarding and fat just as a default—a man who has everything, so does the impossible, and I believe Froebe's ecstasy over Goldfinger's discovery that he's found an even more joyous way to satisfy his hunger for wealth by simply destroying everybody else's money—whereas his constant affable annoyance with his new pet spy brings an awful lot of automatic (but not trivializing, or unthreatening) comedy to the film, in the ways he invariably pitches each new lease on life he gives Bond as self-aggrandizing noblesse oblige. (It's Froebe's great face, but Collins is terrific, too, deciding that Goldfinger's still German anyway; and "No, Mr. Bond! I expect you to die!" could only be more legendary if Bond actually died.) Froebe's backed up marvelously by Sakata, whose mute brute has more personality than most movies' big bads, a stout collection of thrillingly smug expressions regarding his absolute physical dominion over poor Bond, bolstered by camerawork that makes him loom and tower; maybe being a professional wrestler by trade helped, because there could not have been too many "proper" actors who could've made his gimmick, throwing a hat, actually menacing, let alone managed the intricate balance between keeping that menacing while acknowledging that the necessity of having to go over and pick the fucking thing up every time is still extremely funny, especially when he misses. As for the good guys, besides the aforementioned "good Bond Girl" performances (I particularly enjoy Mallet cutting Connery's attempt to say "Bond, James Bond" off at the knees), Connery is completely revived from the aimless meandering of Russia With Love, while still leavening the thug of Dr. No—it's entirely possible it's his best performance in the role—keeping the insouciant cruelty and the sneering, mean humor, but also playing shades of an actual person, particularly selling Jill's death as something that legitimately horrifies him—an inhuman novelty even in his barbaric trade—and keeping in communication with that horror, and the slightest whisper of something like guilt, even beyond that one scene; and the moment of admiring awe he allows himself to feel for Goldfinger's plan is perfectly Bond, who, after all, respects anyone who's a master of their craft, at the same time it's a perfect reflection of the audience's own astonished surprise. I'm also very taken with the matter-of-fact sincerity of, "He's quite mad, you know."
If we're to praise Connery further, then we'd be moving into how this Bond movie was constructed by its new-to-the-franchise director, Guy Hamilton (Eon's first choice for Dr. No, in fact, who eagerly took this opportunity when Terence Young bowed out); it's tempting to attribute the quantum leap Goldfinger makes as a reflection of Hamilton's talent, but, maybe unfortunately, I've seen his other Bond movies (they include a solid choice for the worst one, too). So I guess we just have to nebulously attribute it to all the right elements coming together. Adam's return was vital, anyway, and armed with the budgets of Dr. No and Russia With Love combined, he put Eon's money to work: throughout, there's been a great deal of swell location management (and location recreation), and richly-done quotidian (and semi-quotidian) spaces, but then Adam hits us with one of the Bond series' most unforgettable gonzo-modernist sets in the form of Goldfinger's "rumpus room," an angular wonderland of push-buttons, projectors, scale models, and deadly nerve gas pumps, evidently existing solely for the purpose of one single presentation, offered to an audience Goldfinger always intended to murder; and even that's nothing compared to the vault of Fort Knox, a cavernous set combining the neoclassicism of a bank with a fantasia on utilitarianism, where glittering stacks of gold soar towards the rafters within a hollow cube of prison-like cells (Adam recalls being stoked they couldn't shoot inside the Depository, for he knew from the Bank of England what gold bullion actually looked like, unimpressively small-but-heavy stacks, and he had far better ideas****). It's the perfect locale for any action movie's action climax.
All of Goldfinger's action is great (for 1964 it's straight-up revelatory), and I saved the best for last. Maybe Goldfinger's threat of laser vivisection (starting with Bond's genitals) isn't "action" as such, but it's a quakingly great thrill sequence that Hunt put together, getting dangerously jagged with his cutting as our hero comes shockingly close to just begging for his life, and it is the Bond deathtrap for good reason even if it's not even "easy escapable," Goldfinger just lets him out on a lark. It is at least in contention as a runner-up for the film's single best part. But there's little question what its best sequence is: and that, of course (and in another series first!), is the big "Bond brings down an army while he has a personal battle" of that climax, which separates the burly, impersonal struggle of extras from the intimate one waged between Bond and Oddjob. We can remain critical here: it does involve my only complaint about Hunt's editing. It was early days for multi-threaded action film cross-cutting—Return of the Jedi was eighteen years hence—and there's a bounce back to the obviously-less-interesting "army dudes versus Chinese infiltrators" phase that pulls energy out of the sequence rather than adding any. But that's a minor thing when set against how amazing this is in almost every other detail, the way it's staged across what is mostly empty space—casting a pall over the struggle, like the two last men on Earth buried alive (a sensation heightened by the deafening absence of Barry's score, so that it's nothing but the electric hum of the vault and the exertions of two men prepared to die, right up until Bond has an idea)—but always using the special configuration, and all three dimensions, of that space.
The grace notes are glorious, from start to finish: Oddjob shrugging off a Goddamn gold bar thrown square at his chest; the flying headlock Connery effects on Sakata that's one of the most astonishingly physical pieces of screen fighting I've ever seen; even the "army dude" phase has that rad moment where one of Goldfinger's goons is crushed when the vault swings back open; and of course there's the utter corniness of the atom bomb's timer stopping at "007" which, itself, happens because Bond is too stupid and flustered at the sight of the armageddon machine's innards to realize there's just an "off" switch. (Good thing Leiter got in.) Even the second, Goldfinger-killing climax here—so often proving problematic in Bond's future—is quick and creatively gnarly. The very end just re-runs Dr. No's "hm, rescue or sex? sex" final frames with Pussy Galore and a parachute, because Goldfinger also realizes what ain't broke doesn't need fixing. Goldfinger is not my very favorite James Bond film, but it is the consensus's favorite for all the right reasons, and it would be my own "if you only see one" one, too.
Score: 10/10
*"Aerosol deployment of nerve gas kills everybody" is also several degrees more believable than the "everybody will drink a glass of water at the exact same time" assumption that book-Goldfinger makes.
**An American, no less!
***Sure, we can declare movie-Pussy queer erasure, though considering it's an Ian Fleming novel, maybe it's no great loss.
****On the other hand, one is bound to be impressed by the location shooting outside Fort Knox where they just outright disobeyed the U.S. military's orders and sent Pussy's airplanes down to 500 feet to get the shot.
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